Sonoma State biology professor Lisa Hua has received a new four-year, $591,600 award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health (NIH), for research on chromosome organization that has implications in understanding human diseases, including cancer.
The prestigious grant is the first that the university has ever received from NIH.
Hua said the grant provides needed funding while also serving as an endorsement of the study's significance.
“Grant reviewers are scientists who look for both intellectual merit – how exciting or fundamental the research project is, the quality of the preliminary data – and whether the work has broad impacts among the scientific and non-scientific community,” she said.
“The goal of my lab is to uncover how human cells regulate their chromosome organization during cell division throughout normal and disease states. This study is also relevant to the training of future scientists, because this entire project has been driven by students.”
Since 2019, students in the Hua Lab have been examining chromosome organization during cell division using human and mouse cell line models.
“During cell division, chromosomes will duplicate and divide equally among two daughter cells. Our hypothesis is that, with aging, these underlying processes start becoming compromised,” Hua said. “We want to identify at what specific time window that happens and how that process is related to the increased susceptibility to disease as we age.”
In the preliminary research, this pattern of chromosome organization is lost in a specific type of renal cancer, she said. However, it is unknown whether this pattern persists in normal human cells throughout an individual’s lifetime.
SSU student researchers use specialized microscopes to view DNA in cells, including a high-resolution confocal microscope Hua purchased with National Science Foundation funding. Through a collaboration with Hua’s mentor, Professor Takashi Mikawa at the University of California San Francisco, her research students are able to access microscopes at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus to perform live imaging of human cells.
“For the NIH grant, we are looking at DNA organization in individuals at three stages of life: newborns, young adults (18-25) and older persons (50-70),” Hua said. “By examining the patterning of chromosomes at different points, we are trying to determine whether there is a specific time window when the cellular processes change and whether that is associated with an increased incidence or onset of age-related diseases.”
Hua said her group’s study of individual patient samples already has taken years, and will require more time and funding to collect a statistically significant data set.
The NIH grant will help with two of the factors that have limited data collection: the cost of buying patient-derived cells to study in the lab and the reagent costs associated with growing cells from a broad population of individuals.
“Adult cells take longer to divide; the ability for the cells to undergo cellular division is slower. So maintaining them in the lab is time-consuming and expensive,” she said.
Putting their research into the context of future disease intervention or treatment, Hua said a discovery at this level could lay a new foundation for understanding fundamental cell biological principles that could be used to better understand human disease.
“Receiving NIH research grant funding for the first time is a major milestone for an emerging research institution like SSU, said Gabrielle Utarid, Senior Director of the Office of Research & Sponsored Programs at Sonoma State.
“This funding not only provides crucial financial support for groundbreaking research but also elevates SSU’s reputation in the scientific community. As with funding from other major granting agencies, this achievement can lead to more funding, collaborations, and innovations, driving significant advancements in scientific knowledge and public health and fostering a culture of inquiry and discovery on campus,” she said.
Research reported in this press release is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number 1R16GM153517. This project is solely supported by federal funding in the amount of $591,600. The content of this press release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.